Cunningham, Ruth

ORAL HISTORY OF RUTH CUNNINGHAM
Interviewed by Jim Kolb
December 13, 2002
[Side A]
Mr. Kolb: Okay, Ruth, let’s start out by having you tell us how and why you first came to Oak Ridge.
Mrs. Cunningham: We had talked together, my husband and I, in North Carolina, [inaudible] from Raleigh for eight years. We had moved to Mooresville in the time of war and we were thinking it would be good to get back to Tennessee. I think we wrote to Peabody people to say we’d be glad if there was an opening in Tennessee. We had not even heard of Oak Ridge, but our professor at Peabody recommended to Dr. Blankenship that here would be a man worthy of considering. Dr. Blankenship contacted my husband, and we drove into Oak Ridge for an interview. A man came out to the car. We really had the car packed up to come back to Tennessee, but the man came out to ask, “Are there any guns in your car?” and we said, “No, no.”
Mr. Kolb: This is at the gate coming into Oak Ridge?
Mrs. Cunningham: Yes, but my little boy said, “But Mama, we’ve got the fly gun.” Anyway, we stayed at the Alexander.
Mr. Kolb: For how long?
Mrs. Cunningham: Just for the interview. One night, I guess, and Dr. Blankenship invited us to his house for the interview that evening. My husband had an interview in the office that day, then we were invited, and they didn’t have anything to make – didn’t have any sugar. Mrs. Blankenship tried to serve our refreshments with the baby’s formula. And I just couldn’t drink it, but my husband bravely drank it all down, and she said, “You’re a brave soul!” But we had a wonderful introduction to Dr. Blankenship and his family. Great people.
Mr. Kolb: And he hired you on the spot, no doubt.
Mrs. Cunningham: So that’s the way we got to Oak Ridge. And Dr. Blankenship wanted my husband, as principal of the high school, to be close to his work, because he knew he’d have to get back over there at night. That was the one building there up on the hill where everything, you know, basketball games, labor unions, prayer meetings, acting –
Mr. Kolb: Were in the auditorium of the high school?
Mrs. Cunningham: All sorts of programs, and so often my husband would call and say, “Tell Bert to send me some supper.” He did not have time to come home to supper. Blankenship Field was down there, but no fence around it that we could scoot right through up to the high school building.
Mr. Kolb: So your husband was the high school principal?
Mrs. Cunningham: For too many years. It was a killing job. It was night and day. And when he was offered a chance to give orientation to the new people being hired, he changed, and we got to see him sometimes. But that high school job –
Mr. Kolb: And you went to work where? Or did you work right away?
Mrs. Cunningham: No. We had our younger boy, Joel, who – you may know him now as president of the University of the South at Sewanee.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, he is.
Mrs. Cunningham: And his picture’s over there. Anyway, he was a baby when we came, just big enough to run away.
Mr. Kolb: I see, he was a toddler.
Mrs. Cunningham: And it looked as if my husband might be going to be changed to St. Louis and transferred, and they said there were no houses there, and we loved this house. See, we moved into it when we got here, and we’ve been right in this house ever since [112 Gordon Road, Oak Ridge, Tennessee]. So I took a job in order to be able to hold this house. They said there was no housing in St. Louis. And then it turned out he didn’t get changed.
Mr. Kolb: So you started in 1947.
Mrs. Cunningham: That’s right.
Mr. Kolb: At Pine Valley?
Mrs. Cunningham: Mhm.
Mr. Kolb: And what grade did you teach there?
Mrs. Cunningham: Fifth.
Mr. Kolb: Fifth grade.
Mrs. Cunningham: It’s a wonderful grade to teach.
Mr. Kolb: Who was the principal then there at Pine Valley? Do you remember?
Mrs. Cunningham: Different ones, Mrs. Elder, a woman principal, and later Tom –
Mr. Kolb: Dunigan?
Mrs. Cunningham: Dunigan. Also, there was an RNL who was in [inaudible].
Mr. Kolb: Really? Was that just during the war, probably?
Mrs. Cunningham: I don’t remember.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, Ruth, so you lived here on Gordon [Road] within walking distance of Jackson Square area, Townsite.
Mrs. Cunningham: I’ve got a story I want to tell in the paper right now about my walking to Jefferson when Dr. Cushman was our neighbor.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, I see, the superintendent of schools, right?
Mrs. Cunningham: And this is an answer to one Mr. Smyser wrote.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, he wrote about you walking to Jefferson?
Mrs. Cunningham: No, I’m going to tell about that.
Mr. Kolb: You want to tell it right now? Go right ahead.
Mrs. Cunningham: When we had that awful snow storm in ’60, about a year after my husband had died, and my son was interning in Denver and developed hepatitis from laboratory – caught it, you know – was sent home to recuperate. So I was teaching and had to provide his food in a certain way every day, and had to sit by his chair, and he was not supposed to walk much. He was supposed to stay still. And there came this terrible snow storm. Dr. Cushman lived two doors down. Dr. Cushman, who was from the north, did not believe in turning school out, so I had to walk to school early. The snow was such the cars couldn’t travel. But anyway, I was walking to school; I was enjoying walking up this back way until the snow came. Here I had to do what I could to get my son taken care of with the thing at home, then walk down back behind Dr. Cushman’s house, down across the practice field, and it was a lovely walk in nice weather, but with the snow getting deeper all of the time, I started to hope Dr. Cushman would see me plodding away, getting up that hill to school. But no, every morning, surely he’ll close school, surely he’ll close school. No closing, and me trying to plod away to get things taken care of and Joel going to high school, and he going one way and me the other. And finally, Mr. Smyser said he was called the “Abominable Snowman,” Dr. Cushman, because he wouldn’t close school. And I believe it was the fourth day, I just was saying, like, how could I walk all that way to school, but still I felt like I couldn’t miss a day. I was responsible for the family’s income.
Mr. Kolb: And you had class to teach, too.
Mrs. Cunningham: And I was struggling to get ready to go to school. The people of Oak Ridge had pushed so Dr. Cushman had given in. It was announced on the radio: no school today.
Mr. Kolb: The fourth day?
Mrs. Cunningham: I think it was the fourth day. Anyway, I broke down and cried, I just cried, and the boys said, “Why in the world did you cry when it was better?” But I’ll tell you, those were tears of relief.
Mr. Kolb: You were relieved, yeah, tears of joy, relief. Well, did Mr. Cushman ever say anything to you about your having to walk to school through the snow? No. You don’t know whether he ever saw you or not, right?
Mrs. Cunningham: Well, yes, [inaudible]. And when my son graduated, I guess it all turned around. They sent a congratulatory gift. I guess that was before this happened.
Mr. Kolb: Well, let’s go back to the World War II days a little bit more. That’s what we really want to focus on right now. What was it like to live in Oak Ridge. Of course you had to walk a lot, I’m sure. Did you and your husband have a car? Could you use a car?
Mrs. Cunningham: Yes, we had a car.
Mr. Kolb: And you got gasoline for it?
Mrs. Cunningham: But I never was a good driver, so we weren’t using it much.
Mr. Kolb: So you walked to Pine Valley, probably?
Mrs. Cunningham: No, one neighbor drove me to Pine Valley, and her husband drove my husband to the plant to work. See, I didn’t start teaching till he had changed to this orientation program. Soldiers marched on the field when we were first – Blankenship.
Mr. Kolb: Blankenship, right.
Mrs. Cunningham: We didn’t even call it Blankenship then, but they would march and march. My little cousin came to see us, the next year, I guess, and he’d go out on the back porch and march, and one day he said, “I could be a soldier, but I don���t got no marching hat.” When my husband and I heard that, we got him a hat, so he could march.
Mr. Kolb: Go play soldier with him. Did he want a gun, next, to march with?
Mrs. Cunningham: No. Anyway, Dr. Weinberg lived on the corner right up here.
Mr. Kolb: Did you know him?
Mrs. Cunningham: Oh, yes. You see, his boys, his older boy David and my little boy were big friends. And so Dr. Weinberg would be out working. I’m trying to think if that’s a World War connection, though. But the only thing we’d always notice about Dr. Weinberg, he always kept white gloves on his hands, even when he’d be digging out. But, you see, he played piano.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, yeah, didn’t want to hurt his hands, protect his hands. But white gloves.
Mrs. Cunningham: But that gets away from who – well, I do have a lot of memories, you know. Sewing.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, did you have a sewing club you belonged to or just do it by yourself?
Mrs. Cunningham: We were just invited to come and make things for the soldiers.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, did you women get together, you mean?
Mrs. Cunningham: I’ll think of it better tonight, what we did.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, well you probably got together just to visit. We call it, up north, coffee klatch. Visit over coffee and sewing and that sort of thing. And you were a member of the Disciples Church, here, I believe. How was your church relationship, then, early on? There weren’t churches built.
Mrs. Cunningham: We were glad to come back to Tennessee to a Church of Christ, because we had been raised in the Church of Christ, but there had not been a good Church of Christ post in North Carolina, so we worshipped in the churches where we lived. And we did go to a Christian Church close to Raleigh sometimes, and then when we moved over closer to Tennessee, we just didn’t try to go. It was wartime. Our gas was restricted, and the Church of Christ was fifteen miles away, ten, I don’t know how much.
Mr. Kolb: Outside of Oak Ridge?
Mrs. Cunningham: We got outside of Mooresville, North Carolina, where we lived, just a little bit before ten. But anyway, the Church of Christ man insisted that we better come to – and not go to any other church. Better come there. And do you know, but let’s not put this in.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, I’ll stop.
[break in recording]
Mrs. Cunningham: We changed into the Christian Church.
Mr. Kolb: You went to the Christian Church.
Mrs. Cunningham: And always stayed with them.
Mr. Kolb: And that’s where you stayed?
Mrs. Cunningham: Still, Church of Christ people still send me, the women send me cards, but my husband, he used to like to work in the church, and he did.
Mr. Kolb: Now, where did you worship? Did you worship at Chapel on the Hill early on, or where?
Mrs. Cunningham: We went to Chapel on the Hill a lot. Weddings, school teacher weddings.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, I mean on Sunday mornings.
Mrs. Cunningham: We met in a little white Friend Church out on Alabama Road.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, East Village, in East Village?
Mrs. Cunningham: That was the Christian Church.
Mr. Kolb: I see. So you had to drive down there, then. That’s a little ways away. Well that’s good, and it grew from there didn’t it? It grew a lot. It’s a big church now. Well, how did you get along shopping? Did you have to go down here to Jackson Square to shop? Or Townsite? Is that where you shopped?
Mrs. Cunningham: Well, see we walked down to Jackson Square. My husband was a good shopper and we had workshops. It was Saturday morning. The schools had workshops. And he’d shop while I’d go to workshops. He didn’t have to work. And it was funny. I’d sit in the workshop and make a grocery list sometimes, and if I got home, I’d plan the evening, [he] brought the groceries, and our grocery lists, his and mine, just about matched.
Mr. Kolb: He just read your mind.
Mrs. Cunningham: But he very soon found places out in the country to buy butter and eggs.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, the local people?
Mrs. Cunningham: And then he would take some of it to the Blankenships. They would pay.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, okay, you shared with them a little bit, that’s good. He found out the good sources of the real homemade butter and bread and things like that, and eggs probably. Weren’t eggs hard to find?
Mrs. Cunningham: Eggs were always, eggs and butter were not around, but he’d always go over to take it to the Blankenships. Then Dr. Blankenship, he paid his part. We had a good story there. Dr. and Mrs. Blankenship were playing tennis. They were both good tennis players. But our oldest little girl was keeping the children. Five little Blankenships. Three little girls and then two little boys. So this little boy was a toddler, he was close to two years old, I guess, and when my husband brought in the butter and eggs and whatever from the country, sometimes, and you know, peaches or grapes or berries or whatever. Anyway, this little girl said, “We need to change him,” said, “We can take care of the baby, but we can’t keep him still!” That was the toddler. And so my husband put the baby up on the table and all of the little Blankenships stood around and watched, and he changed the baby! And that’s the kind of relationship we had with the Blankenships.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, you trusted each other.
Mrs. Cunningham: They were delightful, lovely people. We never felt as comfortable with Dr. Ostrander.
Mr. Kolb: Well, the first time is always the best, I guess they say. Well as far as you and your husband shopping, maybe you could say you had him well trained.
Mrs. Cunningham: He liked to shop. He liked to find the bargains.
Mr. Kolb: Well, there wasn’t a lot of choice in Oak Ridge, really, was there?
Mrs. Cunningham: Well, no, there were always shortages.
Mr. Kolb: Shortages.
Mrs. Cunningham: But you had to do without.
Mr. Kolb: And did you have to stand in line quite a long time, sometimes, too?
Mrs. Cunningham: Mhm.
Mr. Kolb: Did you ever go shopping in, like, Clinton or Knoxville, outside of Oak Ridge?
Mrs. Cunningham: I didn’t.
Mr. Kolb: You didn’t. Did your husband ever?
Mrs. Cunningham: If he’d find there was a real good bargain somewhere, somebody would tell him, he might go. But I don’t remember ever shopping outside of those places right here in town.
Mr. Kolb: Right, that took care of your needs. Did you go to any of the recreation activities in Oak Ridge very much?
Mrs. Cunningham: Nah. He became a Kiwanian.
Mr. Kolb: A Kiwanian, okay.
Mrs. Cunningham: And we went to all the Kiwanis, when it was ladies’ night and that kind of thing.
Mr. Kolb: You mentioned he was active in the Playhouse, I believe.
Mrs. Cunningham: Oh, yes. My husband had been an actor in college, and he acted in the Playhouse. And he was in The Man Who Came to Dinner. But he had to – now, you see, they practiced in the high school building, but they practiced so long and hard, he had to say he just couldn’t do it after that. He did that one well and was praised for it.
Mr. Kolb: Well, that��s good. Was Paul Ebert the director then? Remember Paul Ebert?
Mrs. Cunningham: I know him, you know, but I don’t believe he was director that early.
Mr. Kolb: Maybe it was before his time. He came early, but not, maybe, right in the beginning. Well the Playhouse has done well. It’s right, still down there in Jackson Square, you know, where the theater used to be.
Mrs. Cunningham: I had a wonderful experience last week. My friends had a little granddaughter in the play, The Sound of Music. They brought her up after the play. And she stood at the foot of our bed, sweet little girl, she had performed for the [inaudible] that morning, and then they brought her right from the performance. She stood at the foot of our bed and sang those wonderful songs.
Mr. Kolb: Which you knew real well, I’m sure, from The Sound of Music. Well that was a wonderful treat, wasn’t it.
Mrs. Cunningham: Most of the time, I just stayed home then. I taught school and graded papers.
Mr. Kolb: Took care of your boys, of course.
Mrs. Cunningham: And took care of my boys.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, they were busy boys, too.
Mrs. Cunningham: I didn’t have many activities. I worked in the church.
Mr. Kolb: Did you teach Sunday school there too?
Mrs. Cunningham: Taught Sunday school. But I stayed busy. But right now, I wish I hadn’t spent as much time as I did grading papers. What is it worth?
Mr. Kolb: I know, it’s just something that teachers felt they had to do, right? Give all that homework, then you gotta check it. That’s the way it is.
Mrs. Cunningham: We brought in the first television.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, my. You remember when that was about?
Mrs. Cunningham: Pretty early.
Mr. Kolb: Probably in the ’50s, I would imagine.
Mrs. Cunningham: In the ’50s, and here my husband would say, “Let’s watch this or that,” and I’d say, “I’ve got to grade these papers.”
Mr. Kolb: So did he watch TV while you graded papers?
Mrs. Cunningham: But he was asked – he taught the Sunday school, the adult one, the good class at the Christian Church hallway, and he spent a lot of time, sit and read his Bible and study it.
Mr. Kolb: I’m sure he was well prepared.
[break in recording]
Mr. Kolb: Storytelling. Did you make up stories, or did you just read stories to the children? From books that you knew, that you had?
Mrs. Cunningham: Both.
Mr. Kolb: Both. Well you made up some stories too?
Mrs. Cunningham: Sure. I made up many of them, and I’ve got a collection of them that my grandpa told from the Civil War stories that I heard as a little child. And I’ve got them written down.
Mr. Kolb: Well, good. You wrote them down?
Mrs. Cunningham: I just wrote them out. But I didn’t know to authenticate them, to say exactly where this happened.
Mr. Kolb: Well, that’s interesting. That’s getting to be a lost art, storytelling. But you know, have you heard about Jonesboro, Tennessee?
Mrs. Cunningham: Oh, yeah.
Mr. Kolb: Is the center of storytelling.
Mrs. Cunningham: I sure wished I could go, but my children went. They went this year and came back down, telling me some good stories.
Mr. Kolb: That’s a big success over there. I haven’t gone yet; I want to go sometime, but you have to get your reservations in early, they say, or you can’t get in. They sell the tickets out; they’re gone.
Mrs. Cunningham: They say it was just wonderful.
Mr. Kolb: I bet. Both of your sons went?
Mrs. Cunningham: No, just my older son, Dr. Bert. He and his wife went.
Mr. Kolb: Bert and Lynn.
Mrs. Cunningham: And just loved it.
[break in recording]
Mr. Kolb: Okay, Ruth, Oak Ridge was unique early on because it was a secret town, secret city, all behind a fence and all guarded. How did that affect you, this atmosphere of being protected from everybody else?
Mrs. Cunningham: Yeah, our people had never heard of it, our Tennessee people, and they insisted on writing to us at Clinton. They’d heard of Clinton, not Oak Ridge, and we had to let people know, we had to tell them and write them so they could write –
Mr. Kolb: To Oak Ridge.
Mrs. Cunningham: They didn’t have to write –
Mr. Kolb: To Clinton.
Mrs. Cunningham: Yeah, they could write to Oak Ridge. They just couldn’t believe it. Even just to drive by, you still didn’t know it was here until you got directed to come here.
Mr. Kolb: Or you hit a fence and you couldn’t go in of course, or you got to the gates. But did you enjoy having the security of being guarded, you might say?
Mrs. Cunningham: Yeah, I don’t think we ever even thought about locking our doors.
Mr. Kolb: That’s what I’ve heard, yeah. People just trusted their children would be safe and they could be out and around. Did your boys like to go out around town and ride buses? Did they ever ride the buses?
Mrs. Cunningham: My older son was [inaudible] here, he was like a junior, and the younger one, when he got older, Joel, who is now in Sewanee, didn’t like it ’cause he didn’t have as many names as Bert. So my husband, quick wit, “Well, you can be Joel Luther Cunningham, Esquire.”
Mr. Kolb: Oh my goodness, Esquire, that’s fancy.
Mrs. Cunningham: One Sunday afternoon, he ran away. We took a Sunday afternoon nap and had him in the bed. Well, I guess the older boy had left the door open, and he just disappeared. You know, where in the world was he? But all over town then, there were little playgrounds set up by the government, and after a while a man told us, he said, “There’s a little boy here on this playground over on Florida Avenue, and somebody here says he looks like the Cunningham child,” but says, “He says his name is Esquire.”
Mr. Kolb: That’s the one, the Esquire Cunningham. So you found your son because he was Esquire.
Mrs. Cunningham: Of course, my husband went running over there fast. I was more of a stay at home mom.
Mr. Kolb: But he never was really lost, I’m sure, you just knew he was in good hands.
Mrs. Cunningham: Then we had a more interesting thing about his name. But that’s not telling you what you want to hear.
Mr. Kolb: No, that’s okay. You go ahead; that’s fine.
Mrs. Cunningham: He was named Joel Luther Cunningham, and we didn’t even know any Lutherans, but my husband’s younger brother had died from a football accident then, but his name was Luther, so we named him Luther. When he got up to Susquehanna, they’d say, “How did you know to name him for Martin Luther, when he was born?”
Mr. Kolb: There’s more Luthers than Martin Luther aren’t there. So he got credit for being a Lutheran early on.
Mrs. Cunningham: But I have a great deal of respect for the Lutherans.
Mr. Kolb: Good, good, thank you.
Mrs. Cunningham: And my very dearest friend, Prue Brewer, was a strong Lutheran and I used to go to church with her. And it was her son, Dr. Buck Brewer who came to see me last week.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, you told me that. That’s great. Well, that’s interesting. Well, Oak Ridge was kind of unique too in the fact there were so many different churches here, people from all over the county, right, and even different, all over the world, came in from Europe and every place and they brought all these different churches in with them and different forms of religion.
Mrs. Cunningham: But for a long time at Chapel on the Hill, different churches had services there, all the time.
Mr. Kolb: They’d change every hour or so and they’d bring in another. They had to be a community church ’cause there weren’t enough churches to go around. There were just a few, right?
Mrs. Cunningham: No buildings, [just] white frame country church buildings. When I was teaching at Pine Valley, it was all a new world to me, because those children had been under Mrs. Elder. They’d been having progressive education, which meant freedom to do as you pleased, and when I first went into that fifth grade classroom, you couldn’t get them to hold still at one time. They were used to just moving around, laughing and talking and having a good time. But Prue Brewer was teaching across the hall, and she helped me to see it through, to see what we could do to ever get those children quiet and still. And that’s the way we got to be friends so much so, that I’m still highly respecting her sons.
Mr. Kolb: That’s wonderful. Do you remember any other teachers at Pine Valley you taught with besides Mrs. Brewer?
Mrs. Cunningham: There was Cates Beard.
Mr. Kolb: Ruth Cates Beard.
Mrs. Cunningham: Mrs. McKanney, but she has died. A lot of those teachers have died.
Mr. Kolb: And, of course, you had lots of children that you had to shepherd too, and do you remember many of them, offhand?
Mrs. Cunningham: Couldn’t really.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, there was a lot of them.
Mrs. Cunningham: Oh, I loved that fifth grade, and we finally got them quiet enough to learn something, and then they transferred me to Jefferson, all the difference in the world in fifth grade and seventh grade.
Mr. Kolb: It was a junior high school then?
Mrs. Cunningham: Junior high. By the seventh grade, children are into the hormone. In fact, I’ve got a book over here now that David Zava wrote, about cancer really, but it’s about the hormone, and people just don’t know how much, there’s all the difference in the world, a fifth grade child and a seventh grade child.
Mr. Kolb: In just two years, yeah, they change.
Mrs. Cunningham: About two years. The fifth graders believe in their teacher. And the seventh grader has got into that place where, well they may never have treated you that way, Tina [friend in attendance, Mrs. Tina Job], because you did the right things, but most seventh graders thought their mothers just almost didn’t know anything.
Mr. Kolb: Or the teachers didn’t know much more, right? Hard to crack into their shell.
Mrs. Cunningham: And way after a while, they come back to you and say, well, maybe your parents did know a little.
Mr. Kolb: Twenty years later, they see it differently.
Mrs. Cunningham: But anyway, the rest of the time, I taught at Jefferson.
Mr. Kolb: Was that hard work, probably, to teach there? Yeah, it was. Who was your principal there, do you remember?
Mrs. Cunningham: Wallace Spray?
Mr. Kolb: Spray?
Mrs. Cunningham: Mr. Spray. Mr. McKean.
Mr. Kolb: McKean?
Mrs. Cunningham: McKean, and then Mr. Wallace Spray.
Mr. Kolb: Wallace Spray. That’s still a nice school. It’s a lot bigger school now.
Mrs. Cunningham: And then Mr. Moss, the last year.
Mr. Kolb: Moss? Mr. Moss? I see. He was there a long time. Do you remember any of the children there, especially mean ones that were hard to deal with, maybe?
Mrs. Cunningham: Yeah, but a lot of good ones.
Mr. Kolb: A lot of good ones too, yeah.
Mrs. Cunningham: Well, I’m going to have to have a little something.
[break in recording]
Mr. Kolb: You got a story to tell us?
Mrs. Cunningham: My good caregiver, my morning caregiver is retarded in a way, but good. She likes to fix my face, use a little, and the other morning she said, Miss Ruth, the day you go to heaven, will you please let me be sure to fix your face? I thought a minute, and I said, “Well, that ought to be arranged, because if St. Peter saw my face, the way it looks before you fixed it, he might send me in the other direction.”
Mr. Kolb: I’m sure he wouldn’t. Appearances don’t mean much up in heaven, I don’t think, thank goodness.
Mrs. Cunningham: But we do want this to be a happy room, and we did, when we decided that I’d stay home after I couldn’t walk, I couldn’t walk safely, we made it into a retirement center. We want it to be a happy place.
Mr. Kolb: It sure is. That’s good.
Mrs. Cunningham: And we’re enjoying it.
Mr. Kolb: Well, listen, you’re getting tired. I want to ask you just a couple more questions quickly.
[break in recording]
Mr. Kolb: Well, Ruth, I want to ask you one last thing about what you thought about when the first bomb was dropped, atomic bomb was dropped, how did you hear about the news about the atomic bomb, about Oak Ridge being involved in the atomic bomb?
Mrs. Cunningham: My husband was working here and we were staying with his father in middle Tennessee that summer till we got housing, and he started working, and so we were down there when we heard that the bomb had been dropped. And I guess I remember my older boy standing out on the bank of the road shouting to everybody that the bomb had been, you know, announcing about it, and we were all so happy there, and we had a phone, so I guess he called. I don’t know how he felt about it, but we were down there when that happened.
Mr. Kolb: Were you kind of surprised at that news, what Oak Ridge was doing, was all about?
Mrs. Cunningham: Yes, it was so important because the story was Oak Ridge. It was not exactly a secret city anymore, but it took a good while for a lot of Tennesseans to realize there was an Oak Ridge.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, right, and why it was secret in the first place. Do you remember when World War II ended, just about nine days later, after the first bomb? Were you still there in middle Tennessee, or were you back here?
Mrs. Cunningham: We had come back here.
Mr. Kolb: Do you remember when the gates were opened and the secret city went away in 1949?
Mrs. Cunningham: Yeah.
Mr. Kolb: Were you here when they had the big parade?
Mrs. Cunningham: A big parade, you know, part of it down on Tennessee, and my little boy, Joel, had measles. And so I stayed at home with the measles case, but we could see the celebration.
Mr. Kolb: Well, you were very lucky then, but that was an exciting time, wasn’t it.
Mrs. Cunningham: Yes, it was. And everybody, everybody was out and gone, but Joel couldn’t go, and so Mama couldn’t go.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, your husband and your older son went, I guess.
Mrs. Cunningham: When was that?
Mr. Kolb: 1949, I believe. I don’t remember the exact date, but it was ’49.
Mrs. Cunningham: Yes, he was very active.
Mr. Kolb: Then you had to get used to not having guards at the gates anymore, and you didn’t have to have a pass and that sort of thing.
Mrs. Cunningham: That’s right. Oh, and we had our problems with passes. My mother came, got outside the gate, you know, and couldn’t find her pass, and called, well, not knowing how far away, and that was the gate over close to I-40, and the bus driver called to ask if somebody could come bring her a pass. And my son was big enough then to do it. So Bert had to go by and get the pass, you know, and get it signed, and then walk all the way out there and later, bless her heart, she found it. After all of that trouble, it was down somewhere in her big purse. And there were other times. Well, one big time, when my husband had trouble. We played basketball with other teams around here, and invariably, when a bus would come in with a basketball team, a few people would slip onto the bus that didn’t have passes, thinking it would be all right to ride to the game, and then he would have to go and get passes for those people before they’d let the bus come in.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, for goodness sakes. He had to do the hard work and get it all fixed up.
Mrs. Cunningham: That’s one of the many things that he had to do that made him accept a change away from being a principal, because that’s what he came here for.
Mr. Kolb: How long was your husband a principal? You started in –
Mrs. Cunningham: Here, just the two years.
Mr. Kolb: Just the two years, okay.
Mrs. Cunningham: When he died, he was a reporter with the Atomic Energy Commission, one of those men that his reports had to be fastened to the arm to be carried to Washington.
Mr. Kolb: Secret reports?
Mrs. Cunningham: Federal reports.
Mr. Kolb: He acted as a courier then, probably. Important job. Well that’s interesting. He had an interesting career, and so did you. Being a school teacher is a lot of hard work, but a lot of interesting memories you have too, as a result.
Mrs. Cunningham: Even now I love seeing the names of my people in the paper.
Mr. Kolb: I’m sure, yeah, there’s hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of them, too many to count probably.
Mrs. Cunningham: ‘Course, I taught her [Tina’s] husband. He was just a good little boy.
Mr. Kolb: Well, that’s a good way to be remembered, a good little boy. As a final thing, what do you think about Oak Ridge as a place to live, when you were here.
Mrs. Cunningham: Well, we always loved it. We just couldn’t bear the idea of having to move to St. Louis back at that time.
[Side B]
Mr. Kolb: You didn’t want to go to St. Louis?
Mrs. Cunningham: Well, we moved into this house in ’45. We never remodeled, except we added inside improvements. And I’ve never wanted to leave it. You see, after my husband’s death, I began to keep foreign people. I have had, living in this house, people from eighteen different countries.
Mr. Kolb: For how long, several months at a time?
Mrs. Cunningham: Well, the last one stayed two and a half years.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, my goodness.
Mrs. Cunningham: He was from Mexico.
Mr. Kolb: You got to be good friends, I guess.
Mrs. Cunningham: And then now, he says, “Anybody in this room, I get to come back, they get out, that’s my room.”
Mr. Kolb: Well you had a lot of interesting people you met that way, too.
Mrs. Cunningham: An interesting experience, a Turkish bride and groom came here. I had several Turkish people. I’m very fond of the Turkish people. But they wanted an American baby. My son, a doctor, they wanted to confer with a doctor about insurance and all that, you know, and then that baby was born in Harriman where my doctor son was practicing, but here, a little Turkish baby. I’ve got a picture here somewhere, me loving that little Turkish baby.
Mr. Kolb: So the baby was living here with his parents?
Mrs. Cunningham: Yeah, for a while.
Mr. Kolb: I bet they really remember you fondly, too.
Mrs. Cunningham: I loved all.
Mr. Kolb: Well, I imagine the people of Oak Ridge, the people is what you didn�����t want to leave. You wanted to stay around because you had so many friends.
Mrs. Cunningham: Yeah. But these people who stayed here were doing research at ORNL, and I guess I had more from Turkey, but I had them from everywhere.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, well, that’s amazing.
Mrs. Cunningham: India, Germany, Slovenia.
Mr. Kolb: I guess once the word got out that you were a wonderful hostess, why, they just –
Mrs. Cunningham: Well, they had housing, and I was so disappointed when I found that they didn’t have it any anymore, because it was all I could do would just be to call and say, “This person is moving, can you send me someone else?”
Mrs. Tina Job: Well, was it ORNL that you would call? Who would you call?
Mrs. Cunningham: I called ORNL. And I did that when – see, Tina knows my Mexican.
Mr. Kolb: The last one that was here. How long ago was that?
Mrs. Tina Job: He left a year ago.
Mrs. Cunningham: Christmas.
Mrs. Tina Job: Yeah, right at Christmastime.
Mrs. Cunningham: He said, “Someday you will hear my Mexican voice helloing your door.”
Mrs. Tina Job: That’s right. He’s so sweet. He was a wonderful man.
Mrs. Cunningham: And she and I – he was very fond of her.
Mrs. Tina Job: Yeah, and we used to live right next door. We lived right next to her here for a while, a couple years.
Mr. Kolb: You’ve got more connections than you can –
Mrs. Cunningham: Some of the best neighbors I ever had were the Jobs. They have a Community Church here and I like it the way it says that Tom Job teaches, not Tom Job preaches, Tom Job teaches.
Mr. Kolb: That your husband?
Mrs. Tina Job: Yeah.
Mr. Kolb: Wonderful. I’m sure he’s a wonderful man.
Mrs. Cunningham: You go to Grace Lutheran or Faith Lutheran?
Mr. Kolb: Faith Lutheran. Got a lot of friends at Grace, though.
Mrs. Cunningham: You see, I went with Prue to Grace Lutheran.
Mr. Kolb: Good, that’s a nice church too.
Mrs. Cunningham: Good, good times, many times.
Mr. Kolb: Is Prue still alive?
Mrs. Cunningham: No. And we’ve got pictures of my closest friends, but we don’t have a good picture of Prue. We’ve got a picture of her children down there, but her son is going – the one who came last week – going to send me a nice big picture to put beside my picture of Prue, ’cause she was such a close, dear friend.
Mr. Kolb: I bet. I see you’ve got a picture of Dr. Smallridge over there. Was he superintendent while you were teaching, Dr. Smallridge?
Mrs. Cunningham: No.
Mr. Kolb: He just retired about two years ago from the Oak Ridge Schools.
Mrs. Cunningham: I don’t know. He wasn’t – right now, I can’t see who was at the school.
Mr. Kolb: That’s okay. I just saw his picture over there. He knew a lot of teachers, too.
[end of recording]

Click tabs to swap between content that is broken into logical sections.

ORAL HISTORY OF RUTH CUNNINGHAM
Interviewed by Jim Kolb
December 13, 2002
[Side A]
Mr. Kolb: Okay, Ruth, let’s start out by having you tell us how and why you first came to Oak Ridge.
Mrs. Cunningham: We had talked together, my husband and I, in North Carolina, [inaudible] from Raleigh for eight years. We had moved to Mooresville in the time of war and we were thinking it would be good to get back to Tennessee. I think we wrote to Peabody people to say we’d be glad if there was an opening in Tennessee. We had not even heard of Oak Ridge, but our professor at Peabody recommended to Dr. Blankenship that here would be a man worthy of considering. Dr. Blankenship contacted my husband, and we drove into Oak Ridge for an interview. A man came out to the car. We really had the car packed up to come back to Tennessee, but the man came out to ask, “Are there any guns in your car?” and we said, “No, no.”
Mr. Kolb: This is at the gate coming into Oak Ridge?
Mrs. Cunningham: Yes, but my little boy said, “But Mama, we’ve got the fly gun.” Anyway, we stayed at the Alexander.
Mr. Kolb: For how long?
Mrs. Cunningham: Just for the interview. One night, I guess, and Dr. Blankenship invited us to his house for the interview that evening. My husband had an interview in the office that day, then we were invited, and they didn’t have anything to make – didn’t have any sugar. Mrs. Blankenship tried to serve our refreshments with the baby’s formula. And I just couldn’t drink it, but my husband bravely drank it all down, and she said, “You’re a brave soul!” But we had a wonderful introduction to Dr. Blankenship and his family. Great people.
Mr. Kolb: And he hired you on the spot, no doubt.
Mrs. Cunningham: So that’s the way we got to Oak Ridge. And Dr. Blankenship wanted my husband, as principal of the high school, to be close to his work, because he knew he’d have to get back over there at night. That was the one building there up on the hill where everything, you know, basketball games, labor unions, prayer meetings, acting –
Mr. Kolb: Were in the auditorium of the high school?
Mrs. Cunningham: All sorts of programs, and so often my husband would call and say, “Tell Bert to send me some supper.” He did not have time to come home to supper. Blankenship Field was down there, but no fence around it that we could scoot right through up to the high school building.
Mr. Kolb: So your husband was the high school principal?
Mrs. Cunningham: For too many years. It was a killing job. It was night and day. And when he was offered a chance to give orientation to the new people being hired, he changed, and we got to see him sometimes. But that high school job –
Mr. Kolb: And you went to work where? Or did you work right away?
Mrs. Cunningham: No. We had our younger boy, Joel, who – you may know him now as president of the University of the South at Sewanee.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, he is.
Mrs. Cunningham: And his picture’s over there. Anyway, he was a baby when we came, just big enough to run away.
Mr. Kolb: I see, he was a toddler.
Mrs. Cunningham: And it looked as if my husband might be going to be changed to St. Louis and transferred, and they said there were no houses there, and we loved this house. See, we moved into it when we got here, and we’ve been right in this house ever since [112 Gordon Road, Oak Ridge, Tennessee]. So I took a job in order to be able to hold this house. They said there was no housing in St. Louis. And then it turned out he didn’t get changed.
Mr. Kolb: So you started in 1947.
Mrs. Cunningham: That’s right.
Mr. Kolb: At Pine Valley?
Mrs. Cunningham: Mhm.
Mr. Kolb: And what grade did you teach there?
Mrs. Cunningham: Fifth.
Mr. Kolb: Fifth grade.
Mrs. Cunningham: It’s a wonderful grade to teach.
Mr. Kolb: Who was the principal then there at Pine Valley? Do you remember?
Mrs. Cunningham: Different ones, Mrs. Elder, a woman principal, and later Tom –
Mr. Kolb: Dunigan?
Mrs. Cunningham: Dunigan. Also, there was an RNL who was in [inaudible].
Mr. Kolb: Really? Was that just during the war, probably?
Mrs. Cunningham: I don’t remember.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, Ruth, so you lived here on Gordon [Road] within walking distance of Jackson Square area, Townsite.
Mrs. Cunningham: I’ve got a story I want to tell in the paper right now about my walking to Jefferson when Dr. Cushman was our neighbor.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, I see, the superintendent of schools, right?
Mrs. Cunningham: And this is an answer to one Mr. Smyser wrote.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, he wrote about you walking to Jefferson?
Mrs. Cunningham: No, I’m going to tell about that.
Mr. Kolb: You want to tell it right now? Go right ahead.
Mrs. Cunningham: When we had that awful snow storm in ’60, about a year after my husband had died, and my son was interning in Denver and developed hepatitis from laboratory – caught it, you know – was sent home to recuperate. So I was teaching and had to provide his food in a certain way every day, and had to sit by his chair, and he was not supposed to walk much. He was supposed to stay still. And there came this terrible snow storm. Dr. Cushman lived two doors down. Dr. Cushman, who was from the north, did not believe in turning school out, so I had to walk to school early. The snow was such the cars couldn’t travel. But anyway, I was walking to school; I was enjoying walking up this back way until the snow came. Here I had to do what I could to get my son taken care of with the thing at home, then walk down back behind Dr. Cushman’s house, down across the practice field, and it was a lovely walk in nice weather, but with the snow getting deeper all of the time, I started to hope Dr. Cushman would see me plodding away, getting up that hill to school. But no, every morning, surely he’ll close school, surely he’ll close school. No closing, and me trying to plod away to get things taken care of and Joel going to high school, and he going one way and me the other. And finally, Mr. Smyser said he was called the “Abominable Snowman,” Dr. Cushman, because he wouldn’t close school. And I believe it was the fourth day, I just was saying, like, how could I walk all that way to school, but still I felt like I couldn’t miss a day. I was responsible for the family’s income.
Mr. Kolb: And you had class to teach, too.
Mrs. Cunningham: And I was struggling to get ready to go to school. The people of Oak Ridge had pushed so Dr. Cushman had given in. It was announced on the radio: no school today.
Mr. Kolb: The fourth day?
Mrs. Cunningham: I think it was the fourth day. Anyway, I broke down and cried, I just cried, and the boys said, “Why in the world did you cry when it was better?” But I’ll tell you, those were tears of relief.
Mr. Kolb: You were relieved, yeah, tears of joy, relief. Well, did Mr. Cushman ever say anything to you about your having to walk to school through the snow? No. You don’t know whether he ever saw you or not, right?
Mrs. Cunningham: Well, yes, [inaudible]. And when my son graduated, I guess it all turned around. They sent a congratulatory gift. I guess that was before this happened.
Mr. Kolb: Well, let’s go back to the World War II days a little bit more. That’s what we really want to focus on right now. What was it like to live in Oak Ridge. Of course you had to walk a lot, I’m sure. Did you and your husband have a car? Could you use a car?
Mrs. Cunningham: Yes, we had a car.
Mr. Kolb: And you got gasoline for it?
Mrs. Cunningham: But I never was a good driver, so we weren’t using it much.
Mr. Kolb: So you walked to Pine Valley, probably?
Mrs. Cunningham: No, one neighbor drove me to Pine Valley, and her husband drove my husband to the plant to work. See, I didn’t start teaching till he had changed to this orientation program. Soldiers marched on the field when we were first – Blankenship.
Mr. Kolb: Blankenship, right.
Mrs. Cunningham: We didn’t even call it Blankenship then, but they would march and march. My little cousin came to see us, the next year, I guess, and he’d go out on the back porch and march, and one day he said, “I could be a soldier, but I don���t got no marching hat.” When my husband and I heard that, we got him a hat, so he could march.
Mr. Kolb: Go play soldier with him. Did he want a gun, next, to march with?
Mrs. Cunningham: No. Anyway, Dr. Weinberg lived on the corner right up here.
Mr. Kolb: Did you know him?
Mrs. Cunningham: Oh, yes. You see, his boys, his older boy David and my little boy were big friends. And so Dr. Weinberg would be out working. I’m trying to think if that’s a World War connection, though. But the only thing we’d always notice about Dr. Weinberg, he always kept white gloves on his hands, even when he’d be digging out. But, you see, he played piano.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, yeah, didn’t want to hurt his hands, protect his hands. But white gloves.
Mrs. Cunningham: But that gets away from who – well, I do have a lot of memories, you know. Sewing.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, did you have a sewing club you belonged to or just do it by yourself?
Mrs. Cunningham: We were just invited to come and make things for the soldiers.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, did you women get together, you mean?
Mrs. Cunningham: I’ll think of it better tonight, what we did.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, well you probably got together just to visit. We call it, up north, coffee klatch. Visit over coffee and sewing and that sort of thing. And you were a member of the Disciples Church, here, I believe. How was your church relationship, then, early on? There weren’t churches built.
Mrs. Cunningham: We were glad to come back to Tennessee to a Church of Christ, because we had been raised in the Church of Christ, but there had not been a good Church of Christ post in North Carolina, so we worshipped in the churches where we lived. And we did go to a Christian Church close to Raleigh sometimes, and then when we moved over closer to Tennessee, we just didn’t try to go. It was wartime. Our gas was restricted, and the Church of Christ was fifteen miles away, ten, I don’t know how much.
Mr. Kolb: Outside of Oak Ridge?
Mrs. Cunningham: We got outside of Mooresville, North Carolina, where we lived, just a little bit before ten. But anyway, the Church of Christ man insisted that we better come to – and not go to any other church. Better come there. And do you know, but let’s not put this in.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, I’ll stop.
[break in recording]
Mrs. Cunningham: We changed into the Christian Church.
Mr. Kolb: You went to the Christian Church.
Mrs. Cunningham: And always stayed with them.
Mr. Kolb: And that’s where you stayed?
Mrs. Cunningham: Still, Church of Christ people still send me, the women send me cards, but my husband, he used to like to work in the church, and he did.
Mr. Kolb: Now, where did you worship? Did you worship at Chapel on the Hill early on, or where?
Mrs. Cunningham: We went to Chapel on the Hill a lot. Weddings, school teacher weddings.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, I mean on Sunday mornings.
Mrs. Cunningham: We met in a little white Friend Church out on Alabama Road.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, East Village, in East Village?
Mrs. Cunningham: That was the Christian Church.
Mr. Kolb: I see. So you had to drive down there, then. That’s a little ways away. Well that’s good, and it grew from there didn’t it? It grew a lot. It’s a big church now. Well, how did you get along shopping? Did you have to go down here to Jackson Square to shop? Or Townsite? Is that where you shopped?
Mrs. Cunningham: Well, see we walked down to Jackson Square. My husband was a good shopper and we had workshops. It was Saturday morning. The schools had workshops. And he’d shop while I’d go to workshops. He didn’t have to work. And it was funny. I’d sit in the workshop and make a grocery list sometimes, and if I got home, I’d plan the evening, [he] brought the groceries, and our grocery lists, his and mine, just about matched.
Mr. Kolb: He just read your mind.
Mrs. Cunningham: But he very soon found places out in the country to buy butter and eggs.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, the local people?
Mrs. Cunningham: And then he would take some of it to the Blankenships. They would pay.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, okay, you shared with them a little bit, that’s good. He found out the good sources of the real homemade butter and bread and things like that, and eggs probably. Weren’t eggs hard to find?
Mrs. Cunningham: Eggs were always, eggs and butter were not around, but he’d always go over to take it to the Blankenships. Then Dr. Blankenship, he paid his part. We had a good story there. Dr. and Mrs. Blankenship were playing tennis. They were both good tennis players. But our oldest little girl was keeping the children. Five little Blankenships. Three little girls and then two little boys. So this little boy was a toddler, he was close to two years old, I guess, and when my husband brought in the butter and eggs and whatever from the country, sometimes, and you know, peaches or grapes or berries or whatever. Anyway, this little girl said, “We need to change him,” said, “We can take care of the baby, but we can’t keep him still!” That was the toddler. And so my husband put the baby up on the table and all of the little Blankenships stood around and watched, and he changed the baby! And that’s the kind of relationship we had with the Blankenships.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, you trusted each other.
Mrs. Cunningham: They were delightful, lovely people. We never felt as comfortable with Dr. Ostrander.
Mr. Kolb: Well, the first time is always the best, I guess they say. Well as far as you and your husband shopping, maybe you could say you had him well trained.
Mrs. Cunningham: He liked to shop. He liked to find the bargains.
Mr. Kolb: Well, there wasn’t a lot of choice in Oak Ridge, really, was there?
Mrs. Cunningham: Well, no, there were always shortages.
Mr. Kolb: Shortages.
Mrs. Cunningham: But you had to do without.
Mr. Kolb: And did you have to stand in line quite a long time, sometimes, too?
Mrs. Cunningham: Mhm.
Mr. Kolb: Did you ever go shopping in, like, Clinton or Knoxville, outside of Oak Ridge?
Mrs. Cunningham: I didn’t.
Mr. Kolb: You didn’t. Did your husband ever?
Mrs. Cunningham: If he’d find there was a real good bargain somewhere, somebody would tell him, he might go. But I don’t remember ever shopping outside of those places right here in town.
Mr. Kolb: Right, that took care of your needs. Did you go to any of the recreation activities in Oak Ridge very much?
Mrs. Cunningham: Nah. He became a Kiwanian.
Mr. Kolb: A Kiwanian, okay.
Mrs. Cunningham: And we went to all the Kiwanis, when it was ladies’ night and that kind of thing.
Mr. Kolb: You mentioned he was active in the Playhouse, I believe.
Mrs. Cunningham: Oh, yes. My husband had been an actor in college, and he acted in the Playhouse. And he was in The Man Who Came to Dinner. But he had to – now, you see, they practiced in the high school building, but they practiced so long and hard, he had to say he just couldn’t do it after that. He did that one well and was praised for it.
Mr. Kolb: Well, that��s good. Was Paul Ebert the director then? Remember Paul Ebert?
Mrs. Cunningham: I know him, you know, but I don’t believe he was director that early.
Mr. Kolb: Maybe it was before his time. He came early, but not, maybe, right in the beginning. Well the Playhouse has done well. It’s right, still down there in Jackson Square, you know, where the theater used to be.
Mrs. Cunningham: I had a wonderful experience last week. My friends had a little granddaughter in the play, The Sound of Music. They brought her up after the play. And she stood at the foot of our bed, sweet little girl, she had performed for the [inaudible] that morning, and then they brought her right from the performance. She stood at the foot of our bed and sang those wonderful songs.
Mr. Kolb: Which you knew real well, I’m sure, from The Sound of Music. Well that was a wonderful treat, wasn’t it.
Mrs. Cunningham: Most of the time, I just stayed home then. I taught school and graded papers.
Mr. Kolb: Took care of your boys, of course.
Mrs. Cunningham: And took care of my boys.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, they were busy boys, too.
Mrs. Cunningham: I didn’t have many activities. I worked in the church.
Mr. Kolb: Did you teach Sunday school there too?
Mrs. Cunningham: Taught Sunday school. But I stayed busy. But right now, I wish I hadn’t spent as much time as I did grading papers. What is it worth?
Mr. Kolb: I know, it’s just something that teachers felt they had to do, right? Give all that homework, then you gotta check it. That’s the way it is.
Mrs. Cunningham: We brought in the first television.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, my. You remember when that was about?
Mrs. Cunningham: Pretty early.
Mr. Kolb: Probably in the ’50s, I would imagine.
Mrs. Cunningham: In the ’50s, and here my husband would say, “Let’s watch this or that,” and I’d say, “I’ve got to grade these papers.”
Mr. Kolb: So did he watch TV while you graded papers?
Mrs. Cunningham: But he was asked – he taught the Sunday school, the adult one, the good class at the Christian Church hallway, and he spent a lot of time, sit and read his Bible and study it.
Mr. Kolb: I’m sure he was well prepared.
[break in recording]
Mr. Kolb: Storytelling. Did you make up stories, or did you just read stories to the children? From books that you knew, that you had?
Mrs. Cunningham: Both.
Mr. Kolb: Both. Well you made up some stories too?
Mrs. Cunningham: Sure. I made up many of them, and I’ve got a collection of them that my grandpa told from the Civil War stories that I heard as a little child. And I’ve got them written down.
Mr. Kolb: Well, good. You wrote them down?
Mrs. Cunningham: I just wrote them out. But I didn’t know to authenticate them, to say exactly where this happened.
Mr. Kolb: Well, that’s interesting. That’s getting to be a lost art, storytelling. But you know, have you heard about Jonesboro, Tennessee?
Mrs. Cunningham: Oh, yeah.
Mr. Kolb: Is the center of storytelling.
Mrs. Cunningham: I sure wished I could go, but my children went. They went this year and came back down, telling me some good stories.
Mr. Kolb: That’s a big success over there. I haven’t gone yet; I want to go sometime, but you have to get your reservations in early, they say, or you can’t get in. They sell the tickets out; they’re gone.
Mrs. Cunningham: They say it was just wonderful.
Mr. Kolb: I bet. Both of your sons went?
Mrs. Cunningham: No, just my older son, Dr. Bert. He and his wife went.
Mr. Kolb: Bert and Lynn.
Mrs. Cunningham: And just loved it.
[break in recording]
Mr. Kolb: Okay, Ruth, Oak Ridge was unique early on because it was a secret town, secret city, all behind a fence and all guarded. How did that affect you, this atmosphere of being protected from everybody else?
Mrs. Cunningham: Yeah, our people had never heard of it, our Tennessee people, and they insisted on writing to us at Clinton. They’d heard of Clinton, not Oak Ridge, and we had to let people know, we had to tell them and write them so they could write –
Mr. Kolb: To Oak Ridge.
Mrs. Cunningham: They didn’t have to write –
Mr. Kolb: To Clinton.
Mrs. Cunningham: Yeah, they could write to Oak Ridge. They just couldn’t believe it. Even just to drive by, you still didn’t know it was here until you got directed to come here.
Mr. Kolb: Or you hit a fence and you couldn’t go in of course, or you got to the gates. But did you enjoy having the security of being guarded, you might say?
Mrs. Cunningham: Yeah, I don’t think we ever even thought about locking our doors.
Mr. Kolb: That’s what I’ve heard, yeah. People just trusted their children would be safe and they could be out and around. Did your boys like to go out around town and ride buses? Did they ever ride the buses?
Mrs. Cunningham: My older son was [inaudible] here, he was like a junior, and the younger one, when he got older, Joel, who is now in Sewanee, didn’t like it ’cause he didn’t have as many names as Bert. So my husband, quick wit, “Well, you can be Joel Luther Cunningham, Esquire.”
Mr. Kolb: Oh my goodness, Esquire, that’s fancy.
Mrs. Cunningham: One Sunday afternoon, he ran away. We took a Sunday afternoon nap and had him in the bed. Well, I guess the older boy had left the door open, and he just disappeared. You know, where in the world was he? But all over town then, there were little playgrounds set up by the government, and after a while a man told us, he said, “There’s a little boy here on this playground over on Florida Avenue, and somebody here says he looks like the Cunningham child,” but says, “He says his name is Esquire.”
Mr. Kolb: That’s the one, the Esquire Cunningham. So you found your son because he was Esquire.
Mrs. Cunningham: Of course, my husband went running over there fast. I was more of a stay at home mom.
Mr. Kolb: But he never was really lost, I’m sure, you just knew he was in good hands.
Mrs. Cunningham: Then we had a more interesting thing about his name. But that’s not telling you what you want to hear.
Mr. Kolb: No, that’s okay. You go ahead; that’s fine.
Mrs. Cunningham: He was named Joel Luther Cunningham, and we didn’t even know any Lutherans, but my husband’s younger brother had died from a football accident then, but his name was Luther, so we named him Luther. When he got up to Susquehanna, they’d say, “How did you know to name him for Martin Luther, when he was born?”
Mr. Kolb: There’s more Luthers than Martin Luther aren’t there. So he got credit for being a Lutheran early on.
Mrs. Cunningham: But I have a great deal of respect for the Lutherans.
Mr. Kolb: Good, good, thank you.
Mrs. Cunningham: And my very dearest friend, Prue Brewer, was a strong Lutheran and I used to go to church with her. And it was her son, Dr. Buck Brewer who came to see me last week.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, you told me that. That’s great. Well, that’s interesting. Well, Oak Ridge was kind of unique too in the fact there were so many different churches here, people from all over the county, right, and even different, all over the world, came in from Europe and every place and they brought all these different churches in with them and different forms of religion.
Mrs. Cunningham: But for a long time at Chapel on the Hill, different churches had services there, all the time.
Mr. Kolb: They’d change every hour or so and they’d bring in another. They had to be a community church ’cause there weren’t enough churches to go around. There were just a few, right?
Mrs. Cunningham: No buildings, [just] white frame country church buildings. When I was teaching at Pine Valley, it was all a new world to me, because those children had been under Mrs. Elder. They’d been having progressive education, which meant freedom to do as you pleased, and when I first went into that fifth grade classroom, you couldn’t get them to hold still at one time. They were used to just moving around, laughing and talking and having a good time. But Prue Brewer was teaching across the hall, and she helped me to see it through, to see what we could do to ever get those children quiet and still. And that’s the way we got to be friends so much so, that I’m still highly respecting her sons.
Mr. Kolb: That’s wonderful. Do you remember any other teachers at Pine Valley you taught with besides Mrs. Brewer?
Mrs. Cunningham: There was Cates Beard.
Mr. Kolb: Ruth Cates Beard.
Mrs. Cunningham: Mrs. McKanney, but she has died. A lot of those teachers have died.
Mr. Kolb: And, of course, you had lots of children that you had to shepherd too, and do you remember many of them, offhand?
Mrs. Cunningham: Couldn’t really.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, there was a lot of them.
Mrs. Cunningham: Oh, I loved that fifth grade, and we finally got them quiet enough to learn something, and then they transferred me to Jefferson, all the difference in the world in fifth grade and seventh grade.
Mr. Kolb: It was a junior high school then?
Mrs. Cunningham: Junior high. By the seventh grade, children are into the hormone. In fact, I’ve got a book over here now that David Zava wrote, about cancer really, but it’s about the hormone, and people just don’t know how much, there’s all the difference in the world, a fifth grade child and a seventh grade child.
Mr. Kolb: In just two years, yeah, they change.
Mrs. Cunningham: About two years. The fifth graders believe in their teacher. And the seventh grader has got into that place where, well they may never have treated you that way, Tina [friend in attendance, Mrs. Tina Job], because you did the right things, but most seventh graders thought their mothers just almost didn’t know anything.
Mr. Kolb: Or the teachers didn’t know much more, right? Hard to crack into their shell.
Mrs. Cunningham: And way after a while, they come back to you and say, well, maybe your parents did know a little.
Mr. Kolb: Twenty years later, they see it differently.
Mrs. Cunningham: But anyway, the rest of the time, I taught at Jefferson.
Mr. Kolb: Was that hard work, probably, to teach there? Yeah, it was. Who was your principal there, do you remember?
Mrs. Cunningham: Wallace Spray?
Mr. Kolb: Spray?
Mrs. Cunningham: Mr. Spray. Mr. McKean.
Mr. Kolb: McKean?
Mrs. Cunningham: McKean, and then Mr. Wallace Spray.
Mr. Kolb: Wallace Spray. That’s still a nice school. It’s a lot bigger school now.
Mrs. Cunningham: And then Mr. Moss, the last year.
Mr. Kolb: Moss? Mr. Moss? I see. He was there a long time. Do you remember any of the children there, especially mean ones that were hard to deal with, maybe?
Mrs. Cunningham: Yeah, but a lot of good ones.
Mr. Kolb: A lot of good ones too, yeah.
Mrs. Cunningham: Well, I’m going to have to have a little something.
[break in recording]
Mr. Kolb: You got a story to tell us?
Mrs. Cunningham: My good caregiver, my morning caregiver is retarded in a way, but good. She likes to fix my face, use a little, and the other morning she said, Miss Ruth, the day you go to heaven, will you please let me be sure to fix your face? I thought a minute, and I said, “Well, that ought to be arranged, because if St. Peter saw my face, the way it looks before you fixed it, he might send me in the other direction.”
Mr. Kolb: I’m sure he wouldn’t. Appearances don’t mean much up in heaven, I don’t think, thank goodness.
Mrs. Cunningham: But we do want this to be a happy room, and we did, when we decided that I’d stay home after I couldn’t walk, I couldn’t walk safely, we made it into a retirement center. We want it to be a happy place.
Mr. Kolb: It sure is. That’s good.
Mrs. Cunningham: And we’re enjoying it.
Mr. Kolb: Well, listen, you’re getting tired. I want to ask you just a couple more questions quickly.
[break in recording]
Mr. Kolb: Well, Ruth, I want to ask you one last thing about what you thought about when the first bomb was dropped, atomic bomb was dropped, how did you hear about the news about the atomic bomb, about Oak Ridge being involved in the atomic bomb?
Mrs. Cunningham: My husband was working here and we were staying with his father in middle Tennessee that summer till we got housing, and he started working, and so we were down there when we heard that the bomb had been dropped. And I guess I remember my older boy standing out on the bank of the road shouting to everybody that the bomb had been, you know, announcing about it, and we were all so happy there, and we had a phone, so I guess he called. I don’t know how he felt about it, but we were down there when that happened.
Mr. Kolb: Were you kind of surprised at that news, what Oak Ridge was doing, was all about?
Mrs. Cunningham: Yes, it was so important because the story was Oak Ridge. It was not exactly a secret city anymore, but it took a good while for a lot of Tennesseans to realize there was an Oak Ridge.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, right, and why it was secret in the first place. Do you remember when World War II ended, just about nine days later, after the first bomb? Were you still there in middle Tennessee, or were you back here?
Mrs. Cunningham: We had come back here.
Mr. Kolb: Do you remember when the gates were opened and the secret city went away in 1949?
Mrs. Cunningham: Yeah.
Mr. Kolb: Were you here when they had the big parade?
Mrs. Cunningham: A big parade, you know, part of it down on Tennessee, and my little boy, Joel, had measles. And so I stayed at home with the measles case, but we could see the celebration.
Mr. Kolb: Well, you were very lucky then, but that was an exciting time, wasn’t it.
Mrs. Cunningham: Yes, it was. And everybody, everybody was out and gone, but Joel couldn’t go, and so Mama couldn’t go.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, your husband and your older son went, I guess.
Mrs. Cunningham: When was that?
Mr. Kolb: 1949, I believe. I don’t remember the exact date, but it was ’49.
Mrs. Cunningham: Yes, he was very active.
Mr. Kolb: Then you had to get used to not having guards at the gates anymore, and you didn’t have to have a pass and that sort of thing.
Mrs. Cunningham: That’s right. Oh, and we had our problems with passes. My mother came, got outside the gate, you know, and couldn’t find her pass, and called, well, not knowing how far away, and that was the gate over close to I-40, and the bus driver called to ask if somebody could come bring her a pass. And my son was big enough then to do it. So Bert had to go by and get the pass, you know, and get it signed, and then walk all the way out there and later, bless her heart, she found it. After all of that trouble, it was down somewhere in her big purse. And there were other times. Well, one big time, when my husband had trouble. We played basketball with other teams around here, and invariably, when a bus would come in with a basketball team, a few people would slip onto the bus that didn’t have passes, thinking it would be all right to ride to the game, and then he would have to go and get passes for those people before they’d let the bus come in.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, for goodness sakes. He had to do the hard work and get it all fixed up.
Mrs. Cunningham: That’s one of the many things that he had to do that made him accept a change away from being a principal, because that’s what he came here for.
Mr. Kolb: How long was your husband a principal? You started in –
Mrs. Cunningham: Here, just the two years.
Mr. Kolb: Just the two years, okay.
Mrs. Cunningham: When he died, he was a reporter with the Atomic Energy Commission, one of those men that his reports had to be fastened to the arm to be carried to Washington.
Mr. Kolb: Secret reports?
Mrs. Cunningham: Federal reports.
Mr. Kolb: He acted as a courier then, probably. Important job. Well that’s interesting. He had an interesting career, and so did you. Being a school teacher is a lot of hard work, but a lot of interesting memories you have too, as a result.
Mrs. Cunningham: Even now I love seeing the names of my people in the paper.
Mr. Kolb: I’m sure, yeah, there’s hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of them, too many to count probably.
Mrs. Cunningham: ‘Course, I taught her [Tina’s] husband. He was just a good little boy.
Mr. Kolb: Well, that’s a good way to be remembered, a good little boy. As a final thing, what do you think about Oak Ridge as a place to live, when you were here.
Mrs. Cunningham: Well, we always loved it. We just couldn’t bear the idea of having to move to St. Louis back at that time.
[Side B]
Mr. Kolb: You didn’t want to go to St. Louis?
Mrs. Cunningham: Well, we moved into this house in ’45. We never remodeled, except we added inside improvements. And I’ve never wanted to leave it. You see, after my husband’s death, I began to keep foreign people. I have had, living in this house, people from eighteen different countries.
Mr. Kolb: For how long, several months at a time?
Mrs. Cunningham: Well, the last one stayed two and a half years.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, my goodness.
Mrs. Cunningham: He was from Mexico.
Mr. Kolb: You got to be good friends, I guess.
Mrs. Cunningham: And then now, he says, “Anybody in this room, I get to come back, they get out, that’s my room.”
Mr. Kolb: Well you had a lot of interesting people you met that way, too.
Mrs. Cunningham: An interesting experience, a Turkish bride and groom came here. I had several Turkish people. I’m very fond of the Turkish people. But they wanted an American baby. My son, a doctor, they wanted to confer with a doctor about insurance and all that, you know, and then that baby was born in Harriman where my doctor son was practicing, but here, a little Turkish baby. I’ve got a picture here somewhere, me loving that little Turkish baby.
Mr. Kolb: So the baby was living here with his parents?
Mrs. Cunningham: Yeah, for a while.
Mr. Kolb: I bet they really remember you fondly, too.
Mrs. Cunningham: I loved all.
Mr. Kolb: Well, I imagine the people of Oak Ridge, the people is what you didn�����t want to leave. You wanted to stay around because you had so many friends.
Mrs. Cunningham: Yeah. But these people who stayed here were doing research at ORNL, and I guess I had more from Turkey, but I had them from everywhere.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, well, that’s amazing.
Mrs. Cunningham: India, Germany, Slovenia.
Mr. Kolb: I guess once the word got out that you were a wonderful hostess, why, they just –
Mrs. Cunningham: Well, they had housing, and I was so disappointed when I found that they didn’t have it any anymore, because it was all I could do would just be to call and say, “This person is moving, can you send me someone else?”
Mrs. Tina Job: Well, was it ORNL that you would call? Who would you call?
Mrs. Cunningham: I called ORNL. And I did that when – see, Tina knows my Mexican.
Mr. Kolb: The last one that was here. How long ago was that?
Mrs. Tina Job: He left a year ago.
Mrs. Cunningham: Christmas.
Mrs. Tina Job: Yeah, right at Christmastime.
Mrs. Cunningham: He said, “Someday you will hear my Mexican voice helloing your door.”
Mrs. Tina Job: That’s right. He’s so sweet. He was a wonderful man.
Mrs. Cunningham: And she and I – he was very fond of her.
Mrs. Tina Job: Yeah, and we used to live right next door. We lived right next to her here for a while, a couple years.
Mr. Kolb: You’ve got more connections than you can –
Mrs. Cunningham: Some of the best neighbors I ever had were the Jobs. They have a Community Church here and I like it the way it says that Tom Job teaches, not Tom Job preaches, Tom Job teaches.
Mr. Kolb: That your husband?
Mrs. Tina Job: Yeah.
Mr. Kolb: Wonderful. I’m sure he’s a wonderful man.
Mrs. Cunningham: You go to Grace Lutheran or Faith Lutheran?
Mr. Kolb: Faith Lutheran. Got a lot of friends at Grace, though.
Mrs. Cunningham: You see, I went with Prue to Grace Lutheran.
Mr. Kolb: Good, that’s a nice church too.
Mrs. Cunningham: Good, good times, many times.
Mr. Kolb: Is Prue still alive?
Mrs. Cunningham: No. And we’ve got pictures of my closest friends, but we don’t have a good picture of Prue. We’ve got a picture of her children down there, but her son is going – the one who came last week – going to send me a nice big picture to put beside my picture of Prue, ’cause she was such a close, dear friend.
Mr. Kolb: I bet. I see you’ve got a picture of Dr. Smallridge over there. Was he superintendent while you were teaching, Dr. Smallridge?
Mrs. Cunningham: No.
Mr. Kolb: He just retired about two years ago from the Oak Ridge Schools.
Mrs. Cunningham: I don’t know. He wasn’t – right now, I can’t see who was at the school.
Mr. Kolb: That’s okay. I just saw his picture over there. He knew a lot of teachers, too.
[end of recording]